Or rather, does not affect the sales and earnings of music, books, video games and movies, all protected by copyright.

To prove it would be the 300 pages of a substantial research funded directly by the European Union with as many as 360 thousand euro.
Results, however, are not at all liked the same to the Commission, so that the study, which was completed in May 2015, has been kept secret until now.
More precisely, the indicted study was conducted by Dutch company Ecory, commissioned by the EU to analyze and deepen the impact of piracy on the copyright content sales.
In work he reported that "in general, the results do not show strong evidence of the influence negative sales statistics for online copyright infringements.
This does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect, but only that the statistical analysis does not demonstrate sufficient confidence that there is a link. "
Moreover, the report shows that illegal downloads could even promote the legal sale of certain products, such as video games.
The only negative connection between piracy and legal sales has been ascertained for the most successful film: "The results show a 40% displacement rate, which means that for every 10 recent movies downloaded illegally, 4 films are seen in less legally".
To disseminate the results uncomfortable the study was only now, Julia Reda, a member of the European Parliament of the German Pirate Party, who posted it on his personal blog after having obtained a copy through a request under European legislation on freedom of access to information.
A further insinuate doubts about the transparency was the European Digital Rights, which the European Organization of online rights, which published a post on its official website suggested, precisely, that the results of the report on piracy have been intentionally hidden from the European Commission, who certainly knew about it: in another study on the subject published in 2016 by two officials of the Commission itself, in fact, was only mentioned the relationship between the illegal downloading of the most successful films and declining sales of the same, not to mention all the other results that went the other way.

From Wired